Founding Brothers
Authors: Joseph J. Ellis
Founding Brothers
THE REVOLUTIONARY GENERATION
JOSEPH J. ELLIS
Vintage Books
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York
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J. ELLIS’
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Founding Brothers
“Lively and illuminating … leaves the reader with a
visceral sense of a formative era in American life.… A shrewd,
insightful book.”
—
The New York
Times
“Masterful.… Fascinating.… Ellis is
an elegant stylist.… [He] captures the passion the founders brought to
the revolutionary project.… [A] very fine book.”
—
Chicago Tribune
“Splendid.… Revealing.… An extraordinary book. Its
insightful conclusions rest on extensive research, and its author’s
writing is vigorous and lucid.”
—
St.
Louis Post-Dispatch
“Ellis has shown here the
considerable power of knowledge—his knowledge.… [He] unpacks the
real issues for his readers, revealing the driving assumptions and riveting
fears that animated Americans’ first encounter with the organized
ideologies and interests we call parties.”
—
The Washington Post Book World
“Lucid.… Bustling stories that … describ[e] how our
early republic ‘looked and felt.’ …
Founding
Brothers
takes on timeworn topics and leavens them with telling
details.… Ellis has such command of the subject matter that it feels
fresh, particularly as he segues from psychological to political, even to
physical analysis.… Ellis’s storytelling helps us more fully hear
the Brothers’ voices.”
—
Business
Week
“Magnificent.… Ellis eloquently conveys the
interconnected personal relationships and overriding issues that set the
nation’s course.… Carefully researched, beautifully
written.”
—
BookPage
“Succinct and telling portraits.… Even those familiar with
‘the Revolutionary generation’ will … find much in its pages
to captivate and enlarge their understanding of our nation’s fledgling
years.”
—
The New York Times Book
Review
“Subtle.… Readers who fancy detective
stories … will enjoy following Ellis down various conjectural
trails.… And those who appreciate the untangling of thought processes
will enjoy seeing Ellis tease out the deeper meanings behind the words of his
protagonists.… Splendid.”
—
The
News & Observer
(Raleigh, North Carolina)
“Learned,
exceedingly well-written, and perceptive.… Ellis is at his best
conveying not only the historical perspective of these patrons of the American
Revolution, but also the personal hurts, joys, capitulations, regrets,
recantations of old wrongs, familial tragedies, and ultimately the final
judgments they make about each other and the Revolution. Along the way, Ellis
manages something rare in a history, rare in any writing: he captures the
ineffable qualities that inhabit friendship.”
—
The Oregonian
“Ellis has long been a
lamp unto the feet of those who study the Revolutionary and early national
periods.… His judgments are balanced, and his prose is effortless, every
page a reward to read.”
—
Houston
Chronicle
“Splendid.… A remarkable read.…
Ellis’s touching portraits are wonderful.… Ellis has a
scholar’s head but a writer’s heart.… [He] tells the human
details of these superhumans in short vignettes that work as individual stories
[and] has a gift for selecting the best detail to illustrate an important trait
or event.”
—
The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution
Contents
For Ellen
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T
HE
IDEA
that gives this book its shape first came to mind while rereading
a mischievous little classic by Lytton Strachey entitled
Eminent
Victorians.
My problem, at least as I understood it at that early stage,
was a matter of scope and scale. I wanted to write a modest-sized account of a
massive historical subject, wished to recover a seminal moment in American
history without tripping over the dead bodies of my many scholarly
predecessors, hoped to render human and accessible that generation of political
leaders customarily deified and capitalized as Founding Fathers.
Eminent Victorians
made Strachey famous for the sophistication
of his prejudices—his title was deeply ironic—but I want to thank
him for giving me the courage of mine. His animating idea, a combination of
stealth and selectivity, was that less could be more. “It is not by the
direct method of scrupulous narration,” Strachey wrote,
that the explorer of the past can hope to depict a singular epoch. If
he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in
unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank and rear; he will shoot a sudden
revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined. He will row
out over the great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a
little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic
specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful
curiosity.
With this model in mind, I rowed out over the great
ocean of material generated in the founding era of American nationhood, lowered
my little bucket as far down as my rope could reach, then made sense out of the
characteristic specimens I hoisted up with as much storytelling skill as my
imagination allowed.
The characteristic specimens were drawn from
that rich depository of published letters and documents generated by scholarly
editors over the past half-century. Like everyone else who has tried to make
sense out of America’s revolutionary generation, I am deeply indebted to
the modern editions of their papers. The endnotes reflect my dependence on
specific collections, but let me record here a more comprehensive appreciation
for the larger project of preservation and publication that, thanks to federal
and private funding, permit us to recover the story of America’s founding
in all its messy grandeur.
As soon as I had drafted a chapter, I
sent it out for criticism to fellow scholars with specialized knowledge about
the issues raised in that particular story. The following colleagues saved me
from countless blunders: Richard Brookhiser, Andrew Burstein, Robert Dalzell,
David Brion Davis, Joanne Freeman, Donald Higginbotham, Pauline Maier, Louis
Mazur, Philip Morgan, Peter Onuf, and Gordon Wood. As anyone familiar with the
historical profession can attest, I had the benefit of criticism from some of
the best minds in the business. What I chose to do with it, of course, remains
my responsibility.
Three friends and mentors read the entire
manuscript and offered substantive or stylistic suggestions on the book as a
whole: Eric McKitrick, who knows more about the political culture of the early
republic than anyone else; Edmund Morgan, who first taught me to do American
history and still does it better than anyone else; Stephen Smith, whose current
position as editor of
U.S. News and World Report
somewhat conceals his
calling as the sharpest pencil inside or outside the beltway.
The
entire manuscript was handwritten in ink, not with a quill but with a
medium-point rollerball pen. The art of deciphering my scrawl and transcribing
the words onto a disk fell first to Helen Canney, who worked with me on three
previous books but was taken away at an early stage of this one. Holly Sharac
picked up where she left off without missing a beat.
My agent,
Gerald McCauley, handled the contractual intricacies of publication and then
became a one-man cheering section on the sidelines. Ashbel Green, my editor at
Knopf, lived up to his reputation as the salt of the earth. His able assistant,
Asya Muchnick, supervised the editing process with a hard eye and a soft
heart.
My older sons, Peter and Scott, drifted to different ends of
the earth while these pages filled up. My youngest son, Alexander, doodled in
the margins of several pages while practicing his own handwriting. Taken
together, my children served as models for the affectionate rivalry that is
brotherhood.
My wife endured the vacant stares of a partner whose
physical presence belied the mental absence of an author living back there in
the eighteenth century. For that, but not for that alone, she deserves the
dedication offered at the start.
Joseph J.
Ellis
Amherst,
Massachusetts
PREFACE
The Generation
N
O EVENT
in American history which was so improbable at the time has seemed so inevitable in retrospect as the American Revolution. On the inevitability side, it is true there were voices back then urging prospective patriots to regard American independence as an early version of manifest destiny. Tom Paine, for example, claimed that it was simply a matter of common sense that an island could not rule a continent. And Thomas Jefferson’s lyrical rendering of the reasons for the entire revolutionary enterprise emphasized the self-evident character of the principles at stake.
Several other prominent American revolutionaries also talked as if they were actors in a historical drama whose script had already been written by the gods. In his old age, John Adams recalled his youthful intimations of the providential forces at work: “There is nothing … more ancient in my memory,” he wrote in 1807, “than the observation that arts, sciences, and empire had always travelled westward. And in conversation it was always added, since I was a child, that their next leap would be over the Atlantic into America.” Adams instructed his beloved Abigail to start saving all his letters even before the outbreak of the war for independence. Then in June of 1776, he purchased “a Folio Book” to preserve copies of his entire correspondence in order to record, as he put it, “the great Events which are passed, and those greater which are rapidly advancing.” Of course we tend to remember only the prophets who turn out to be right, but there does seem to have been a broadly shared sense within the revolutionary generation that they were “present at the creation.”
1
These early premonitions of American destiny have been reinforced and locked into our collective memory by the subsequent triumph of the political ideals the American Revolution first announced, as Jefferson so nicely put it, “to a candid world.” Throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America, former colonies of European powers have won their independence with such predictable regularity that colonial status has become an exotic vestige of bygone days, a mere way station for emerging nations. The republican experiment launched so boldly by the revolutionary generation in America encountered entrenched opposition in the two centuries that followed, but it thoroughly vanquished the monarchical dynasties of the nineteenth century and then the totalitarian despotisms of the twentieth, just as Jefferson predicted it would. Though it seems somewhat extreme to declare, as one contemporary political philosopher has phrased it, that “the end of history” is now at hand, it is true that all alternative forms of political organization appear to be fighting a futile rearguard action against the liberal institutions and ideas first established in the United States in the late eighteenth century. At least it seems safe to say that some form of representative government based on the principle of popular sovereignty and some form of market economy fueled by the energies of individual citizens have become the commonly accepted ingredients for national success throughout the world. These legacies are so familiar to us, we are so accustomed to taking their success for granted, that the era in which they were born cannot help but be remembered as a land of foregone conclusions.
2
Despite the confident and providential statements of leaders like Paine, Jefferson, and Adams, the conclusions that look so foregone to us had yet to congeal for them. The old adage applies: Men make history, and the leading members of the revolutionary generation realized they were doing so, but they can never know the history they are making. We can look back and make the era of the American Revolution a center point, then scan the terrain upstream and downstream, but they can only know what is downstream. An anecdote that Benjamin Rush, the Philadelphia physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, liked to tell in his old age makes the point memorably. On
July 4, 1776, just after the Continental Congress had finished making its revisions of the Declaration and sent it off to the printer for publication, Rush overheard a conversation between Benjamin Harrison of Virginia and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts: “I shall have a great advantage over you, Mr. Gerry,” said Harrison, “when we are all hung for what we are now doing. From the size and weight of my body I shall die in a few minutes, but from the lightness of your body you will dance in the air an hour or two before you are dead.” Rush recalled that the comment “procured a transient smile, but it was soon succeeded by the solemnity with which the whole business was conducted.”
3
Based on what we now know about the military history of the American Revolution, if the British commanders had prosecuted the war more vigorously in its earliest stages, the Continental Army might very well have been destroyed at the start and the movement for American independence nipped in the bud. The signers of the Declaration would then have been hunted down, tried, and executed for treason, and American history would have flowed forward in a wholly different direction.
4
In the long run, the evolution of an independent American nation, gradually developing its political and economic strength over the nineteenth century within the protective constraints of the British Empire, was probably inevitable. This was Paine’s point. But that was not the way history happened. The creation of a separate American nation occurred suddenly rather than gradually, in revolutionary rather than evolutionary fashion, the decisive events that shaped the political ideas and institutions of the emerging state all taking place with dynamic intensity during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. No one present at the start knew how it would turn out in the end. What in retrospect has the look of a foreordained unfolding of God’s will was in reality an improvisational affair in which sheer chance, pure luck—both good and bad—and specific decisions made in the crucible of specific military and political crises determined the outcome. At the dawn of a new century, indeed a new millennium, the United States is now the oldest enduring republic in world history, with a set of political institutions and traditions that have stood the test of time. The basic framework for all these institutions and traditions was built in a sudden spasm of enforced inspiration and makeshift construction during the final decades of the eighteenth century.
If hindsight enhances our appreciation for the solidity and stability of the republican legacy, it also blinds us to the truly stunning improbability of the achievement itself. All the major accomplishments were unprecedented. Though there have been many successful colonial rebellions against imperial domination since the American Revolution, none had occurred before. Taken together, the British army and navy constituted the most powerful military force in the world, destined in the course of the succeeding century to defeat all national competitors for its claim as the first hegemonic power of the modern era. Though the republican paradigm—representative government bottomed on the principle of popular sovereignty—has become the political norm
in the twentieth century, no republican government prior to the American Revolution, apart from a few Swiss cantons and Greek city-states, had ever survived for long, and none had ever been tried over a landmass as large as the thirteen colonies. (There was one exception, but it proved the rule: the short-lived Roman Republic of Cicero, which succumbed to the imperial command of Julius Caesar.) And finally the thirteen colonies, spread along the eastern seaboard and stretching inward to the Alleghenies and beyond into unexplored forests occupied by hostile Indian tribes, had no history of enduring cooperation. The very term “American Revolution” propagates a wholly fictional sense of national coherence not present at the moment and only discernible in latent form by historians engaged in after-the-fact appraisals of how it could possibly have turned out so well.
Hindsight, then, is a tricky tool. Too much of it and we obscure the all-pervasive sense of contingency as well as the problematic character of the choices facing the revolutionary generation. On the other hand, without some measure of hindsight, some panoramic perspective on the past from our perch in the present, we lose the chief advantage—perhaps the only advantage—that the discipline of history provides, and we are then thrown without resources into the patternless swirl of events with all the time-bound participants themselves. What we need is a form of hindsight that does not impose itself arbitrarily on the mentality of the revolutionary generation, does not presume that we are witnessing the birth of an inevitable American superpower. We need a historical perspective that frames the issues with one eye on the precarious contingencies felt at the time, while the other eye looks forward to the more expansive consequences perceived dimly, if at all, by those trapped in the moment. We need, in effect, to be nearsighted and farsighted at the same time.
On the farsighted side, the key insight, recognized by a few of the political leaders in the revolutionary generation, is that the geographic isolation of the North American continent and the bountiful natural resources contained within it provided the fledgling nation with massive advantages and almost limitless potential. In 1783, just after the military victory over Great Britain was confirmed in the Treaty of Paris, no less a figure than George Washington gave this continental vision its most eloquent formulation: “The Citizens of America,” Washington wrote, “placed in the most enviable condition, as the sole Lords and Proprietors of a vast Tract of Continent, comprehending all the various soils and climates of the World, and abounding with all the necessaries and conveniences of life, are now by the late satisfactory pacification, acknowledged to be possessed of absolute freedom and Independence; They are, from this period, to be considered as Actors on a most conspicuous Theatre, which seems to be peculiarly designed by Providence for the display of human greatness and felicity.” If the infant American republic could survive its infancy, if it could manage to endure as a coherent national entity long enough to consolidate its natural advantages, it possessed the potential to become a dominant force in the world.
5
On the nearsighted side, the key insight, shared by most of the
vanguard members of the revolutionary generation, is that the very arguments used to justify secession from the British Empire also undermined the legitimacy of any national government capable of overseeing such a far-flung population, or establishing uniform laws that knotted together the thirteen sovereign states and three or four distinct geographic and economic regions. For the core argument used to discredit the authority of Parliament and the British monarch, the primal source of what were called “Whig principles,” was an obsessive suspicion of any centralized political power that operated in faraway places beyond the immediate supervision or surveillance of the citizens it claimed to govern. The national government established during the war under the Articles of Confederation accurately embodied the cardinal conviction of revolutionary-era republicanism; namely, that no central authority empowered to coerce or discipline the citizenry was permissible, since it merely duplicated the monarchical and aristocratic principles that the American Revolution had been fought to escape.
6
Combine the long-range and short-range perspectives and the
result becomes the central paradox of the revolutionary era, which
was also the apparently intractable dilemma facing the revolutionary generation. In sum, the long-term prospects for the newly independent American nation were extraordinarily hopeful, almost limitless. But the short-term prospects were bleak in the extreme, because the very size and scale of the national enterprise, what in fact made the future so promising, overwhelmed the governing capacities of the only republican institutions sanctioned by the Revolution. John Adams, who gave the problem more concentrated attention than anyone except James Madison, was periodically tempted to throw up his hands and declare the task impossible. “The lawgivers of antiquity … legislated for single cities,” Adams observed, but “who can legislate for 20 or 30 states, each of which is greater than Greece or Rome at those times?” And since the only way to reach the long-run glory was through the short-run gauntlet, the safest bet was that the early American republic would dissolve into a cluster of state or regional sovereignties, expiring, like all the republics before it, well short of the promised land.
7
The chief reason this did not happen, at least from a purely legal and institutional point of view, is that in 1787 a tiny minority of prominent political leaders from several key states conspired to draft and then ratify a document designed to accommodate republican principles to a national scale. Over the subsequent two centuries critics of the Constitutional Convention have called attention to several of its more unseemly features: the convention was extralegal, since its explicit mandate was to revise the Articles of Confederation, not replace them; its sessions were conducted in utter secrecy; the fifty-five delegates
were a propertied elite hardly representative of the population as
a whole; southern delegates used the proceedings to obtain several assurances that slavery would not be extinguished south of the Potomac; the machinery for ratification did not require the unanimous consent dictated by the Articles themselves. There is truth in each of these accusations.
There is also truth in the opposite claim: that the Constitutional Convention should be called “the miracle at Philadelphia,” not in the customary, quasi-religious sense, whereby a gathering of demigods received divine inspiration, but in the more profane and prosaic sense that the Constitution professed to solve what was an apparently insoluble political problem. For it purported to create a consolidated federal government with powers sufficient to coerce obedience to national laws—in effect, to discipline a truly continental union—while remaining true to the republican principles of 1776. At least logically, this was an impossibility, since the core impulse of these republican principles, the original “spirit of ’76,” was an instinctive aversion to coercive political power of any sort and a thoroughgoing dread of the inevitable corruptions that result when unseen rulers congregate in distant places. The Antifederalist opponents of the Constitution made precisely these points, but they were outmaneuvered, outargued, and ultimately outvoted by a dedicated band of national advocates in nine of the state ratifying conventions.
